I use the insight timer app to time my meditations. It keeps tracks of stats such as your average time per meditation and how much time you have meditated with the app overall. I recently passed 200 hours of meditating with the app.
Compared to some, this is a drop in the bucket, even realizing that there has been plenty of meditation that happened before I had the app. But it’s no small number either, if you meditated every day for 20 minutes, it would still take 600 days to reach this amount.
I share this with you for a number of reasons, some of which you may have heard me say before. The spiritual journey is not a destination, you will not get a certain level of enlightenment simply by ‘doing the time.’
However, doing the time is required to move along the path. I will tell you that many of those 200 hours were spent distracted, attempting to center, thinking about stuff. I hope the next 200 will be a bit quieter.
In comparison there are plenty of things I have done for much more than 200 hours, such as driving, watching TV, scrolling Facebook, or even working out. If I estimate 2 minutes of brushing my teeth every day since I had teeth, I have spent more than 200 hours brushing in my lifetime.
Yet there are plenty of things that require much more time to be considered competent. To be a commercial airline pilot, you have to have 1500 hours of flight time. That’s a lot of practice, and I think we all are happy to have our pilots have that kind of experience. Buddhist monks have tens of thousands of hours under their belt (or robes) if they live into middle age.
So, while this seems like a pretty decent number to me now, I look forward to the day when it is a blip in my practice. I let this be an inspiration to continue moving forward in my commitment to my spiritual practice. While there is no hurry to reach somewhere, I feel motivated to commit more fully to my practice.
Join me on the journey!